The US election tells us more than just the result of a Biden victory
For many observers of the US election, we’ve experienced a rollercoaster of emotions for these past few days. In fact, the anxiety, fear and dismay that we experienced going into the wee hours of the morning after the election, when results were far too close for comfort, has been with us for much of the past four years — it’s just come to a head for most of 2020.
That feeling may have alleviated with a Joe Biden victory. But many of us were under no illusion that swathes of the American electorate would now have recognised the error of their ways for voting in Donald Trump back in 2016.
The result is not the landslide one would expect after four years of the most toxic presidency in US history. Nor is it the drawing of a line in the sand where America can now show itself as a moral authority, or one of global leadership.
An American president separated children of migrants from their parents and locked them in cages. He called white supremacists “very fine people”. If anyone wants to portray today’s America as a paragon of ethics, they can pipe down. The tenure of the 45th President, and over 70 million Americans who voted for and support him, refutes any such claim.
Trump’s racism, Islamophobia, casual misogyny and incendiary rhetoric were just fine with millions of Americans. Not only did they agree with everything he said, but he might have left them with a few extra dollars in their pocket. So as far as they were concerned, he was their guy. Just look at the Senate results. Millions of Americans really don’t care about the landscape of American society that they and their president contributed to. It was actually the black vote that saved America from it’s self-inflicted dystopia, which is ironic given their treatment at her hands.
So what if he’s a white supremacist? So what if he’s handled the response to the pandemic so abysmally that he’s even surpassed the incompetence of his white supremacist brethern, Boris Johnson? They didn’t care.
